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In the opening scene of Homer’s The Odyssey, Zeus complains to his favored daughter Athena that mortals love to blame the gods for their problems, when they themselves are the source of most of their troubles.
“Lo, how men blame the gods! From us, they say, spring troubles. But through their own perversity, and more than is their due, they meet with sorrow,” cries the lord of Olympus. Mankind, through its own folly, obsessions, impulses, and fallibility, wreaked havoc on itself. From personal anguish, to interpersonal conflict, to era-defining wars and atrocities, the lament transcends the epic itself.
It’s been on full display this week on X, a platform Homer could have never imagined. Billionaire Elon Musk and a legion of confused racists have whipped themselves into a frenzy over the casting of Oscar-winning actor Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy in Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film adaptation of The Odyssey.
Their chief complaint is that Nyong’o is Black. It’s the same complaint the hyper-online right leveled against adaptations of Snow White, The Little Mermaid, and other adaptations of myths and fairy tales featuring people of color. It is an acute form of aggravation over fantastical characters that — to quote Homer — is brought about only by “their own perversity.”
Musk complained on X that Nolan is “pissing on Homer’s grave,” in casting anything other than a white lady, and replied “true” to another user complaining that the director’s casting decision was a destructive threat to “Western Civilization and everything that helped create it.”
The thing is, the civilizations described by Homer in his two great epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey, are vastly different from the visual representations of them that have been offered up to Western audiences from the European Renaissance through to the present day. Homer supposedly lived in the 8th century, a time when the visual language of storytelling was much more limited. The epics were spoken and performed. Individual scenes are sometimes depicted in pottery or surviving frescos and mosaics. The first written fragment of The Odyssey — produced in Egypt — was put to text around 500 years after the lyrical poem was originally composed. It wouldn’t be until the 17th century that George Chapman produced the first complete English translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey.
In every cycle of interpretation or translation, classicists and artists are — intentionally or subconsciously — imbuing their own biases, and the context of their age, into their work. The Trojan War and the Greek kingdoms that serve as the setting for the Homeric epics were scattered throughout the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa. The people that lived there were diverse, and not — as the great masters of Europe would later depict — a race of lily white, blushing Aryans with nice breasts, or the musculature of Mr. Atlas.
The depiction of Helen is complex. She was created through spoken word, a mythical Spartan beauty every man, woman, and child who listened to the epic could imagine as their own idealized goddess made mortal. In those days, she was probably imagined as a slightly more glowing version of the prettiest girl at the market, a fill-in-the-blank for beauty standards that has transcended over 3,000 years of interpretations, across all forms of cultures and societies. Early depictions of Helen show a Laconian woman of dark hair. The descriptions of her in Homeric mythology and other sources differ in terms of her eye color, hair, and complexion. She is often shown as strong, athletic, and even muscular — as would have been expected of the women of Sparta.
During the European Renaissance, artists — slightly misled by the white marble statues that were once colorfully painted by the societies they were attempting to depict — approached the famed queen with their own standards of exceptional beauty. English translations of The Iliad and Odyssey took the liberty of interpreting Greek terms of nuance describing lighter tones as indicative of blonde whiteness. The period produced depictions of Helen as an almost universally blonde, blue-eyed cherub of softly feminine constitution. The depictions of the gods of the Hellenistic pantheon received a similar treatment. Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus depicts the goddess of love, fertility, and sexual desire with many of the same characteristics as those found in contemporary visualizations of Helen.
In 2004, German director Wolfgang Petersen and writer David Benioff gave us the version of Helen familiar to most modern audiences. The film Troy — a wig-and-sex-heavy take on The Iliad starring Brad Pitt as Achilles and Diane Kruger as Helen. Petersen and Benioff’s Helen was, like Helens before, a product of her age: early-2000s thin-while-still-busty (gone was the lush curvature painted by Jacques-Louis David and Guido Reni), with ice-blonde hair, clear blue eyes, and a swoon-worthy Orlando Bloom as her Paris.
Troy, still the most direct existing comparison to Nolan’s upcoming The Odyssey, was a deeply anachronistic film. It took countless artistic liberties to make the story more digestible to audiences, even if they annoyed classicists and historians. The gods are absent. Patroclus was reframed as Achilles “cousin,” a way of circumventing historic debates about the potential sexual relationship between the two warriors. Paris and Helen manage to flee into a presumed happily-ever-after existence, their enemies dead or otherwise occupied. In the mythology, Helen is returned to her husband and Paris dies in combat.
Somehow, even as he accuses Nolan of “pissing” on Homer’s grave, Musk — a self proclaimed lover of The Iliad and supposed sticker for accuracy — has repeatedly lauded Troy as an “epic” movie.
Troy, like many of the other works depicting Helen, flatten her down to an avatar for a very pretty woman that everyone wants. The film cuts out the tragedy of her mythology. She was a woman who, while undeniably beautiful, was effectively placed under a curse by a goddess as a reward for Paris. She was abducted as a child by Theseus. She was forced to abandon her own child and watch a once-stable kingdom crumble as her husband invoked a political pact made by her father when she was a young woman. Even as Helen is wracked by guilt and grief over what is happening to the Trojans in her name, Aphrodite continues to belittle and berate her into acting as an emotional crutch for the childish, cowardly Paris.
Helen has a small role in The Odyssey. Following her return to Sparta, Odysseus’ son Telemachus visits her and Menelaus seeking information about what happened to his father following the end of the war. Helen offers up tales of Odysseus’ cunning, and — in a moment of witch-like brewing — spikes the dining party’s wine with drugs intended to remove all pain and sadness for a time.
A dark-skinned Helen would not be out of place in any adaptation of the Homeric epics. She is at her core a mirror through which the audience engaging with the work is asked to see the romantic ideal of beauty they believe is true. She is a woman who has in all her mythology been a vehicle for the folly and foibles of men around her, for men who can see nothing but their own desires. But below the surface is a character deeply affected by a decade of separation from her home and child, the pain of becoming a pawn in a goddess’ favoritism toward an unworthy man, and the destruction of her extended family that would follow the war.
The racist response to Nolan’s casting of Nyong’o is not about a concern for fealty to Homer’s intent or to the integrity of the Greek classics. The Greek classics have been morphed and molded so many times that the original stories are often unrecognizable to most audiences. The right-wing outrage is about a refusal to view Helen as anything other than an avatar for their own psychosexual fixation on whiteness as goodness.
As of now, Nolan has only released a couple of teaser trailers for his film, which will be released in July and has already sold out IMAX theaters across the nation. We have no way of knowing what the famed director will ask of Nyong’o as Helen, nor do we know how deeply he will engage with one of the most fascinating women in the global literary canon. Nolan will undoubtedly leave aspects of The Odyssey on the cutting room floor, but at the end of the day, he is interpreting a myth.
Regardless, the frothing mob leveling vitriol at Nolan and Nyong’o are not the arbiters of the role Homer played in shaping art, culture, and the West. They are, in fact, incapable of engaging with him or The Odyssey in any meaningful way at all.
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